A Hijacking

Look, I'm an American. If negotiations for a hijacking on any boat I'm on take longer than two hours and exceed $200, I fully expect some marines (or ex-marines) to come in and take care of matters, in their time honored tradition.

Hell, if you say "It's a story of a ship that gets hijacked that's focused on the chef," I'm thinking that chef had better be Steven Seagal and Erika Eleniak had better be getting geared up to take her kit off for Under Siege 3.

A Hijacking is a Danish film, however (Kapringen)—and our Danish friends have fallen a long way from their Viking days. This is about an hour-and-a-half of a very realistic-seeming sequence of events involving the pirates, the hostages on the ship, and the corporation the hostages worked for.

It's a little unfocused, but rather refreshingly, the main character is the head of the corporation, who decides it's his responsibility to handle the negotiations. He's a noble, if somewhat pigheaded character, who doesn't make a complete mess of things.

Didn't really expect that from a Scandinavian socialist paradise.

The scenes on the boat are grueling and intense. At times, you can almost smell it, as the hostages aren't allowed to use the bathroom and are stuck out in the still, hot air of the Indian Ocean. (At the same time, they're part of what holds the story back, because the hostages are truly helpless.

Although they are able to maintain their bodyfat after four months at sea with limited rations. Heh. Lazy Danish actors.

The negotiating scenes are even more intense, because offers are made, rejected, back-and-forth, with days and weeks between them. The normally perfectly coiffed, hard-ass CEO gets more and more frazzled and you're wondering how long he can go on under the stress he's under.

We liked it. It was not a "high-octane adrenaline-fueled thrill ride," but we weren't really expecting that. Glad it wasn't any longer, though.